This means less work on your part with no need to water. This plant made it to our list of edible wild plants you can forage, and it just happens to be ideal as a cool-season crop as well. You can eat these plants throughout the winter, so they need to be full size by about Halloween. Arugula: Arugula is not a picky plant, and any gardeners can try growing it. View the West Coast Seeds Fall & Winter Gardening Guide here. Some plants can grow in the winter, but others need certain amounts of daylight to fruit. Most vegetable gardens can accommodate winter crops. It only takes about 50 days to mature, is delicious and vitamin-rich, and only thrives in cooler weather. Vegetable Planting Calendar Find out when to plant vegetables with the Almanac's planting guide! Fall Gardening Planting Guide: Vegetables. For certain areas, planting a winter garden in zone 8 may be the best time to get cool crops like broccoli, carrots, and spinach to grow well. The best crops for fall & winter gardening are ones that can handle the colder weather temperatures, … Planting times may be off by as much as 7-10 days depending upon your exact location within this zone. To get a better idea of when to plant, determine the average date of the first killing frost in the fall and then count backwards from that date, using the number of days to maturity for the crop. One important thing to keep in mind when fall and winter gardening is selecting the right crops. The greatest … 1. Until Valentines Day, plants grow very slowly and do not re-grow after harvest as they might in the summer. Best cool season & cold hardy crops for Fall & Winter Gardening. In fact, it may even keep growing after a light snowfall or two, depending on your growing … The guide I have created below (and the printable PDF download version ) are based on several sources (listed below) to create the most accurate, up-to-date, and complete list. Houston gardeners have definitely hit the jackpot for growing conditions—our hot summers are perfect for planting vibrant tropical flowers and other nifty heat-loving plants, and in fall and winter there are so many delicious veggies we can easily plant at home. Some vegetables, such as Brussels sprouts, take up a lot of space for a long time but are still well-worth the investment. You can grow it almost year-round since it is a quick-growing plant, however, the later you grow it in the fall season, the more direct sunlight you will need to give it. Click here to learn more about how to grow Arugula. 2. We'll tell you the earliest dates to plant vegetables in the spring and the last dates that you can plant for a fall harvest, based on average frost dates for your location. The Best Fall and Winter Vegetables to Plant in Houston. For many zone 8 gardeners, the impending fall months mean rain. Download the pdf In our mild coastal climate we can grow some vegetables all winter without protection. Below is a fall gardening guide for zone 7 but it is intended as a guideline only. Choose an open site with free-draining soil, cultivated thoroughly prior to sowing or planting and enriched with organic material.